Wait, what the heck is StarCraft 2 doing here? While Blizzard is still sticking to its general "when it's done" release date for the first installment of the StarCraft 2 trilogy, Wings of Liberty, we were still able to snag some details for our Games of 2009 hub. We snagged some exclusive (and highly work-in-progress) screens from the single-player campaign that you pretty much had to be at BlizzCon to have seen beforehand. Blizzard personnel stressed how work-in-progress these screens are (in fact, one of them might not be accurate anymore), so think of this as a snapshot of where SC2 is right now. After all, remember that the original StarCraft looked like this before it ended up being like this. Additionally, we caught up with lead designer Dustin Browder, and had him talking about how and why the campaign is longer, how StarCraft 2 appeals to both pro Koreans and newbies, and what's up with Jim Raynor.

1UP: First off, some of us were wondering: Do you ever feel limited in the ability to be creative design-wise because of the StarCraft legacy? Do you find yourself caving in to pressures to appease your older fans at the cost of innovating the game?

Dustin Browder: No, not at all. Our intention all along was to create an RTS game that hearkens to the legacy of the original game. That's why we're making the sequel to StarCraft -- if we wanted to do something completely different, we'd call the game something different. Sure, there are some main points we wanted to hit as far as continuing the story from Brood War, and maintaining that frantic, fast-paced feel from the original game. But we have quite a wide breadth to work in, as far as reimagining all three races, introducing some new twists and mechanics to the units, and of course, the exciting things we're doing with the single-player campaign.

Click the image above to check out all StarCraft 2 Wings of Liberty screens.

1UP: Somewhat related, how are you planning to keep StarCraft 2 interesting for pro/tourney level players with something like 300 APM [Ed note: Actions-Per-Minute, a measurement of raw clicking/hot-key pressing that's used as an informal benchmark of player speed/skill] versus more casual RTS players?

DB: It really is a big challenge for us to try and recapture the magic of the original game that made it so compelling to pro-players -- yet at the same time -- attractive for more casual players. You have to remember that the original game sold more than 9.5 million copies worldwide, so even though StarCraft today has a reputation as a super hardcore RTS game, it truly did have mainstream appeal.

Addressing the needs of both the hardcore and the casual players falls into one of Blizzard's core design philosophies, which is: "easy to learn, hard to master." It's something that's right at the forefront of our minds as we develop all of our games. As an example, most of the units in StarCraft 2 can be controlled effectively just by pointing and clicking, which is easy enough for a casual player to grasp; "if I move all my stalkers over here, they're going to shoot at the bad guys." As the casual players get more skilled at the game, they start to learn more advanced concepts -- like focus-fire -- and using abilities such as the stalker's Blink, in order to teleport up and down cliffs for maximum effectiveness.

1UP: Do you anticipate the production cycle for the StarCraft 2 trilogy to feel like making three separate games, or more like World of WarCraft and its expansions, where the bulk of the work is on the first installment, and subsequent ones are more about iterating and refining rather than inventing?

DB: Well that's the hope; that a good amount of the hard work of designing gameplay mechanics and systems, as well as the internal tasks of creating tools and protocols to develop all this content, is mostly settled at this point as we get deeper into the creation of the core game. So once we ship the core game of StarCraft 2 and start delving into the expansions, we'll have a great deal of that infrastructure under our belts and be able to concentrate primarily on content creation for the two expansion sets.

That said, we're conscious of making sure we are providing new and compelling content for the expansions. The meta-aspects of the Zerg and Protoss campaigns, for example, will work a lot differently than how we're doing things with the core StarCraft 2 game. It doesn't make sense for Kerrigan to be flying around in a battlecruiser and picking out mercenary missions for cash, which is what you'll be doing with Raynor in the core game's campaign. So we'll be doing something different with Kerrigan to get her to evolve and grow her Zerg army. Meanwhile, Zeratul's Protoss campaign may require you to engage in diplomacy with the different Protoss tribes in order to gain access to different units and technologies.